Intact
by Systemic Anomaly
Summary: You might not be able to fix being broken. But shame doesn't have to come with the territory. And once you've watched pity replace lust, you learn fast.


**Title:** "Intact"  
**Word Count:** 907  
**Rating:** R for language and sex  
**Summary:** You might not be able to fix being broken. But shame doesn't have to come with the territory.  
**Author's Notes:** I have so many plots currently fighting for dominance in my head, that I just couldn't get _started_ on any of them. But this one just... came out, all in a rush. It's kind of a painful fic, truth be told.

Oh, and the title's a not-quite-so-subtle play on words, 'cause I'm just _that_ clever.

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Greg House never took his clothes off in front of them. Any of them.

Oh, he had before, when his heart was a ragged thing inside his chest, pulled and wrenched and shredded by his own rage against the world, when _everything_ meant nothing and he needed a _distraction,_ until one night he'd woken in tears and in pain thinking _Dead would have been better,_ and fifty-seven minutes later he'd opened the door to the hooker.

Her hands had been there, rough and insistent, pulling and tugging at the hem of his black AC/DC T-shirt, and he'd been sprawled back on his sofa with his legs splayed and his breath coming in shortened, ragged gasps as her lean muscled thighs settled onto his lap, his jeans-restrained erection a pure coiled pain in the pit of his stomach. And for just a moment, he'd been able to close his eyes as her hands roamed to his waistband, able to bite his lip and moan deep in the back of his throat as those expertly _professional_ fingers reached _inside_ his jeans to cup him, stroking and pulling, and for just a moment he'd been able to forget that this woman, this _stranger_ that was touching him in all the right places for all the wrong _reasons_ was not -- and never would be -- the one he wanted to touch.

Dark hair, in tousled waves: what it might be like to tangle his long pianist's fingers in that spill and pull her to him, what it might be like to finally shatter that terrible wall that they'd both built up between them for so long. And beautiful, and, oh, _powerful,_ in a way this girl could never be.

And so he'd moaned in all the right places, lifted his straining hips to let her tug the jeans down his too-narrow waist, and for the first time in nearly seven years he'd _forgotten,_ until everything seemed to suck in on itself like backblown aftermath and the room was _too silent_ all of a sudden, and he'd opened his eyes to see the girl frozen like a ghetto Michelangelo with one hand half-pressed to her mouth and a moment too slow to cover the way her eyes had widened, the way her face had constricted, the way she had looked first at the carved and gutted, blasted ruin of his right thigh and then at her hand like she'd touched something dead by the roadside.

And all at once he hated her, _hated_ Kitty or Karen or Sonya or Sophie or _whatever_ her fucking name was, loathed her with a passion so deep it exploded red behind his eyes, for making him remember that he'd never be really _human_ again, never be _whole,_ never again curl the fingers of his hand around a golf club or a lacrosse stick the way he now so expertly curled them around the handle of his cane... _hated_ her for making him a cripple in the way no knife ever could, and he'd thrown a hundred-dollar bill at her and told her to _Get the hell out, just get OUT, NOW, and shut the fucking door BEHIND you._

The rest of that night, he'd sat with a bottle and a needle and a box of old photographs, systematically crumpling them in one pale hand while he breathed into a shot glass with the other, swiping brutally at his eyes with a wrist. Hating them. Folding, smoothing, replacing them. He didn't have enough memories to remain, as it was. Even the bad ones.

That night, he'd snapped the cane in half before he even knew what he was doing... or that he _could._

_"Guy at the store said it was slimming. Vertical stripes."_

So, now, always the jeans, always some clever excuse, and he'd never had sex or "made love" with anything less on his body... until the night Lisa Cuddy showed up at his front door with a bottle of wine, a mouth blurred with anger and her eyeliner in vague dark circles like the world's weariness beneath her lashes.

Until the night she'd _touched_ him, laid a hand on _that_ thigh with unflinching bravado and looked up into his eyes -- _I was there, and I remember_ -- and something in him had broken loose like a storm-ravaged dam, and he'd wept into her hair and let the darkness take his mind.

Until she loved him, and that was enough.

And after a while, he barely even noticed, never protested when he had both of his hands splayed on the hot smooth skin of her back and she'd be working on the button of his jeans, never noticed when, after a fourteen-hour shift, she'd come home to find him sprawled and asleep sideways across her bed and quietly slip him out of his clothes. Never panicked when he woke up warm and naked beside her, and touched her in the night. Never retreated from her in the shower, or turned away like a bashful child.

Maybe he couldn't heal, maybe he could never be anything but damaged.

But just maybe... he didn't have to be _ashamed._

Just maybe.


End file.
